In Pursuit of Silence

by George Prochnik

  By contrast, the forums of the boom-car enthusiasts were relatively quiet. Indignation was certainly expressed on FloridaSPL about antinoise legislative efforts, but their biggest complaint was the way all boom-car owners were lumped together. There were even occasional surprising metaphysical disquisitions on the site, such as a posting under the “Rants” category by CalusaCustom-Concepts titled “Who Cares About Words?” which began, “Do words have any meaning? Are the words we use important? What are words anyway? Aren’t words the translation of the concepts we imagine? If words are concepts translated into sounds with assigned meanings, then words are expressed ideas.”

  How could I not be intrigued? I made contact with Casey Sullivan, the site manager of FloridaSPL, in an effort to hear their side of the story. Sullivan presented the Memorial Day event at Explosive Sound and Audio as an ideal fact-finding opportunity. He also arranged for me to get “drive arounds” with several forum members on the night before the contest so that I could experience the boom cars in their natural cruising habitat.

  And so it happened that at nine on a Saturday night late in the spring I found myself standing in a parking lot outside Tampa staring through chain-link fencing at a patch of tall reeds that waved back and forth like a metronome, listening to the drone of I-75, waiting for a call from MP3 Pimp. The call came, and I bolted for my vehicle, heading to a Shell station across the road from a Hooters restaurant, in search of a tangerine-colored vehicle with a fractured windshield.

  BOOM-ERANG

  When I reached the station and spotted the one orange car, I thought there’d been some mistake. The vehicle was hardly bigger than a Matchbox car. This could not be the machine of a Boom THUG. The hose was stuck in the tank and there was no one behind the wheel. I got out of my car and walked closer. The windshield was, indeed, finely cracked in many places, creating an effect, in the overhead fluorescence, of delicate ice-crystal calligraphy. A moment later, a large man in long shorts pushed out of the station store, sucking meditatively on a tall soft drink.

  Robin Butler, aka MP3 Pimp, is an ample man in his mid-twenties, with honey skin, light eyes, and a softly curling beard. He looks like a biblical patriarch, only gentler and more self-conscious. We shook hands, and he invited me into the car. The second I yanked open the door on the passenger side (it was broken) and swung in, I realized I was entering a whole new realm. This was not a car interior in any sense I’d ever experienced. Everything had been stripped of its original elements and reconstituted Frankenstein-style—swollen with foam, fiberglass, black speakers, and a profusion of colorful wires. The entire rear half of the car was obscured by immense black audio equipment; the dashboard seemed to consist only of dark metal cavities, coils, and protrusions with a little digital box at the epicenter, like the control panel of a retro-sci-fi vessel. MP3 Pimp turned on the engine. I reached across for my seat belt.

  “No belts,” MP3 Pimp commented. I glanced down at the torn sockets by my hips, and we pulled out onto the highway.

  As we drove, MP3 Pimp occasionally reached up two fingers to push back the duct tape propping different sections of the windshield to prevent them from falling across our laps. I asked him what had triggered his involvement with car audio.

  “Just hearing people with bass driving around—just ever since I can remember hearing it, I remember responding to that sound. And I’ve had something since I was seventeen. Nine years. But as for something as ridiculous as this … maybe two years.”

  And was it really true that his windshield had cracked because of sound?

  “Yup,” he nodded. “Fourth windshield this year. See these dents in the metal?” He pointed up at the ceiling. “Also audio-related.”

  And what is the police response? I inquired.

  He shrugged. “They don’t really bother you too much, as long as you’re respectful. If you drive by a cop with your music on and you turn it down when you see him, he knows it’s you, but you’re being respectful. They might pull you over to check your registration, make sure everything’s in order, but as long as you’re being respectful, it’s okay.” He told me that the people who participated in the shows were rarely the ones creating a public nuisance.

  “So the ones creating the problem are a minority?” I ventured.

  “Well—actually,” MP3 Pimp hesitated. “No. The people who go to shows—most of us are respectable. They call it ‘bumping responsibly’ … But you get the kids: they have a loud system in their cars, and they want everybody to know, so they play it loud all the time. Unfortunately, they’re in the majority because a lot of people who have car stereos don’t come to shows. They don’t even know the shows exist. Some people do it for fun. Some people just like it loud, like me. And some people do it to impress other people, like girls or whatever. Some people abuse everything.”

  And would the strict new antinoise ordinances that had just been introduced in nearby Sarasota affect the attitude of police toward boom cars around Tampa?

  “You know, it changes everything once you have the law looking at you.” He glanced over at me. “Especially when you’re breaking the law.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. He glanced at me again. “Anytime you want me to turn it on, let me know.”

  “Crank it up,” I said. After all, the sound itself was why I was here.

  MP3 Pimp bent forward and began pushing buttons in the lunar panel. Numbers and words lit up and disappeared.

  For the first few seconds of music, I felt very pleased with myself. It was loud, but I could take it, and I enjoyed the rap bass line. I got it. It was fun. MP3 Pimp was still fiddling with buttons. And then, suddenly, the entire system turned on. I felt as if I had been launched in thunder and fire from an ejector seat—only the seat hadn’t ejected and I remained inside the thunder and fire. I felt my organs collapsing. I didn’t hear sound. I just experienced my bones and heart bursting apart through my skin. My hands slammed to the sides of my head and I bent forward, vaguely aware of MP3 Pimp’s finger pulsing a button by my temple; the sound declined.

  “I don’t want to cause you pain,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I managed.

  Recalling the sober audiologist who had recently told me that a single exposure to 140 decibels can cause permanent hearing loss, I straightened back into my seat. “How loud was that?” I finally asked.

  “Oh it gets a lot louder than that,” MP3 Pimp chuckled.

  “How loud?”

  “I don’t know exactly. The loudest I ever heard it is 158.6, and that’s on average, over 50 seconds. What you heard right then is 141, 142. It’s definitely loud. But it gets louder.”

  Some perspective on those numbers: a pneumatic riveter at a distance of four feet produces 125 decibels. The decibel system is logarithmic, with every increase of 10 decibels signifying a tenfold increase in sound. If you are 3 feet away from a rifle when it fires, the sound you hear is approximately 140 decibels. If you are 75 feet away from a jet at takeoff, you are exposed to 150 decibels. Standing 30 feet from a jet at takeoff you hear 160 decibels. The explosion of Krakatoa from 100 miles up in the air or a jet engine heard from one foot away is 180 decibels.

  “What do you think of the groups that say all boom cars are evil?” I blurted out.

  “I’ve never looked at one of the forums before, to be honest. I’ve read some e-mails that I guess a guy from one of them was sending out, and it’s kind of funny because they have no idea what they’re attacking,” he said. “They don’t even know who they’re trying to be at war with.” I asked him what he meant. “Just because somebody has a gun—like a hunter, say—doesn’t mean they’re going to shoot at people. And just because I have a stereo in my car doesn’t mean I’m going to drive by your house every night and bother you. It’s like saying that all people who listen to rap are thugs. But I look on it as a sport. Not an athletic sport obviously, but it’s a hobby that became a sport. It keeps me entertained and busy when I’m not working or with my family.”


  We waited for another FloridaSPL forum member to join us in a truck stop while the single headlight of a police helicopter beamed down over us, the chopping of its blades drowning out the highway. “They’re looking for somebody,” MP3 Pimp said. “They’re looking for somebody.” He sighed. “While we’re waiting I can show you the car.”

  He pointed at the inside of the door. “Took the stock panels and turned them into something they’re not. Took fiberglass and molded it. Cut out the rear deck with an angle grinder. We use like spray foam everywhere, and whatnot. You want to seal off everything as much as you can to keep all the pressure up front. And then …” We walked around back and he opened the trunk. Five car batteries festooned with red-and-blue wires were wedged into the space.

  “Wow.”

  “There’s another one under the hood and one in the corner by the passenger seat, so seven batteries total. They weigh about forty pounds apiece. It actually weighs down the car a lot. Causes everything over here to drop about four inches. We also paint all the windows black; keep the light that’s inside in; keep the light that’s outside out. That way nobody can see in.”

  Big Red emerged from the seat of a giant, elevated red truck that looked like every boy’s fantasy. He was a colossal wallop of a man with a small head, buzzed hair, a mustache, little indentations in his face that looked as though they might, like the dimples in MP3 Pimp’s roof, have been “audio-related,” and a giant black T-shirt airbrushed with a skull. From the other side of the cab hopped a petite woman with plush red hair and a soft, lilting Southern accent (“Big Red’s Lady,” MP3 Pimp joked, as he somewhat sheepishly explained that they all went by nicknames).

  Big Red immediately broke into an anecdote in a surprising, twittery voice. “She watched me put that duct tape on the windshield,” he laughed.

  “Inside?” MP3 Pimp asked.

  “No, not inside. She don’t like it loud inside. It gives her headaches.”

  “I stay away from it when it gets loud-loud,” Big Red’s Lady said. “I get migraines. I like to still be able to hear and enjoy myself for the rest of the day.”

  We moved into Macaroni Grill. Cheesy string music fluttered around us.

  Big Red made a general announcement as we sat down. “Science has proven 100 percent of all divorces can be blamed on marriage.” MP3 Pimp asked him whether he and Big Red’s Lady were married.

  “Noohoho,” said Big Red.

  “He’s been married twice,” said Big Red’s Lady. “I’ve been married once, and not to each other. And you’ve seen the baby that’s with us sometimes—that’s his second marriage. He has a seventeen-year-old by his first marriage. I have a twenty-four-year-old, a twenty-year-old, and a seventeen-year-old.”

  “You’ve got five kids, three failed marriages, and a relationship,” MP3 Pimp noted, in an astonishing split-second calculation. “That’s a beautiful thing.”

  “And an ex-husband who likes guys,” Big Red’s Lady added. The table went quiet. “Yeah … Don’t go there.”

  “No,” Big Red said quickly. “If you’re going to go there, you have to go all the way. An ex-husband who lives with his male roommate that has another boyfriend. We stop by from time to time.” Big Red chuckled.

  “We do.” Big Red’s Lady nodded. “We actually take advantage of the male roommate, because he’s great with computers.”

  MP3 Pimp caught the others up on our conversation so far that evening. “I’ve been explaining to George how not everyone who’s into car audio is a douche bag.”

  Big Red launched in. “I mean as far as proposing a law—I’m all for it. Putting a fine in place for people who drive through a residential neighborhood at three o’clock in the morning banging their stereo. They deserve to get a ticket or double the fine of the ticket. But to take somebody’s car because you can hear it from twenty-five foot away at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon when you’re getting off the interstate, that’s a little steep.”

  For a brief time, Sarasota had become the most costly city in the country in which to violate a municipal noise ordinance. On a first offense, if a vehicle was audible to a police officer from twenty-five feet, the car would be impounded and the violator hit with a $74 fine, in addition to a $125 towing fee. On a second offense, the fine jumped to $250 on top of impound fees. By the third offense it was $500, and the car was impounded for ten days.

  “What really gets me is it’s a misdemeanor,” Big Red continued. “Nonmoving violation misdemeanor. So if you’re going to impound a vehicle for a misdemeanor, why not impound for failing to give right of way to an emergency vehicle? Or for talking on a cell phone while driving down the highway? Those can kill people. The stereo blast is not killing somebody. I understand it can be annoying. But, I mean, I’m forty-three years old, I own my own business. Do I like to get out there on the highway and turn it up every now and then? Yeah, I do. Do people around me get perturbed by it sometimes? They probably do. But you know what? If somebody walked up to me and said, ‘Can you turn that down?’ or ‘I really don’t like that selection or choice of music can you change it?,’ I have no problem doing that.” (The question of how exactly anyone could walk up to Big Red and do anything other than get pancaked as he roared down the highway was not directly addressed.)

  “I’ve been doing this for twenty-five, twenty-six years,” Big Red went on. “I was living in Maryland and I drove by the local radio shop one Saturday and they had some demo vehicles out there. And I just thought, as loud as they were, how pretty the installation looked, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’ve had seven cars since then and every vehicle I’ve had has something in it.” He pointed at his girlfriend. “The Chevy she drives every day, you wouldn’t know it had anything in it. It’s all hidden. Then you turn it on—it’s got something in it.”

  “Oh yeah,” Big Red’s Lady said.

  “But like I said, we are people in our mid-forties. We have people we compete with who are in their mid-fifties that do this.”

  “Oh, there’s a huge range of people,” Big Red’s Lady nodded. “There are eighteen-year-olds to Papa’s—what’s Papa? Fifty-four, fifty-five? And we’ve seen people in their sixties.”

  “All different kinds of backgrounds. We’ve got retired naval officers are in the sport.”

  “There’s Lawyer Boy,” Big Red’s Lady added.

  “We’ve got lawyers involved in the sport. I’m a roofing business involved in the sport. We’ve got county employees—the civil service involved in the sport. We’ve got the guy who works at Publix in a nine-to-five job saving his money.”

  “We’re not getting the kind of good exposure we need to reverse these laws,” MP3 Pimp said.

  Big Red’s Lady nodded. “Because the exposure the people do see is to do with the drug dealers. They don’t see that it’s John and his wife out on a Saturday afternoon with the windows rolled down and their stereo turned up, and they just happened to drive by a cop.”

  Big Red flicked himself forward. “Or Drop Bottom who works sixty hours a week so he can keep his vehicle up and keep it running.”

  Whatever else, I was loving the Midsummer Night’s Dream quality of the nicknames. I asked the table at large how early most participants got into the sport—silently wondering, as I did so, when the term “sport” had become applicable to men seated behind the wheel of a stationary vehicle adjusting the dial on a car stereo.

  “They’re usually kids that are right out of high school,” Big Red’s Lady began. “But no—actually—there’s Mighty Tyke. He’s four.”

  “That’s right.” Big Red nodded. “We have a guy over in Iraq serving his country right now who’s a part of our Team dB Unit, and his son is four or five years old. He has a Power Wheels vehicle that’s got a bass system.” Big Red chuckled. “Mighty Tyke’s Power Wheel’s gone 136—which is louder than what you can hear from twenty-five feet away.”

  “136 with a box and a battery,” Big Red’s Lady nodded. “It’s what—a Grave Dig
ger?”

  “Yeah—a Grave Digger Power Wheels with a box and a battery. They literally put Mighty Tyke’s Power Wheels on a mike to see how loud it was.”

  The conversation about Mighty Tyke hitting 136 decibels in his Grave Digger made for a natural segue to the larger subject of the rising volume of car audio. Big Red explained that when he got truly involved in the sport a few years back, if you were breaking 130 “you were the man,” whereas, the previous night, someone on the forum had put up a video of a guy who hit 181.6.

  “Everything keeps getting louder,” Big Red cheerfully marveled. I mumbled something incoherent about the wonder of ever-improving technological capabilities. But all three of my tablemates pointed out that there were specific reasons why the technology of car audio had spiked of late. The most important factor, they averred, was the Internet. Because of the way that parts and know-how ricochet back and forth between members of forums like FloridaSPL, the speed of technological evolution has dramatically accelerated.